A highly wear-resistant valve seat insert for an internal combustion engine, having a material composition in which hard-particles are uniformly and finely dispersed in the matrix phase, and which is excellent in wear-resistance and radial crushing strength, based on a blended fine powder and a matrix forming powder with a particle size approximately equal to that of the hard-particles so as to prevent the hard-particles from aggregating and thus coarsely dispersing as a hard-particle phase.